Feds spent $1.1M on Tiktok ads despite ban on government devices

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Federal departments and agencies spent more than $1 million advertising on TikTok last fiscal year despite the government’s ban on public servants using the social media app on their work phones.

The findings were disclosed in the federal government’s annual report on advertising activities released earlier this year. In the report, the federal government revealed that 17 per cent of all its social media advertising in the 2023-2024 fiscal year went to the app, which is owned by China’s ByteDance.

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Although the total spend by departments and agencies on TikTok ads only increased to $1.13 million from $1.11 million, the share of budget for the Chinese app was up from eight per cent in the previous fiscal year.

TikTok’s increased share of the government’s total ad spend came even after the application had been banned on all government devices in February 2023.

“Following a review of TikTok, the Chief Information Officer of Canada determined that it presents an unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security,” Mona Fortier, the then-Treasury Board president, said in a statement at the time. 

She added that the government would let the general public decide for themselves if they wanted to use the platform. “However, the Communications Security Establishment’s Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (Cyber Centre) guidance strongly recommends that Canadians understand the risks and make an informed choice on their own before deciding what tools to use,” Fortier said.

The government then reportedly launched a national security review of TikTok in September 2023, according to the Canadian Press, and later ordered the company to shutter its Canadian operations in November, 2024, forcing the closure of its offices in Toronto and Vancouver. The government cited “national security risks” associated with parent company ByteDance.

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In a statement to the Ottawa Citizen, Daniel Savoie, a spokesperson for the Privy Council Office, said federal departments advertise on TikTok to reach key audiences not on other platforms. The advertising includes important and credible information on health, public safety and information on recruitment, he added.

“While the Government of Canada has banned the use of TikTok on all government devices, the placement of Government of Canada ads is coordinated through the Agency of Record, ensuring that Government of Canada devices are not exposed to potential security risks,” Savoie said. 

Last year, the then-CSIS director David Vigneault told CBC that Canadians should be wary of using TikTok, saying that personal data is accessible by the Chinese government.

“As an individual, I would say that I would absolutely not recommend someone have TikTok,” he said.

While the amount the government spent on TikTok in 2023-2024 grew, it significantly shrunk its advertising budgets on Elon Musk’s X and Meta products Facebook and Instagram. In that fiscal, year the federal government spent just $476,271 on advertising on Facebook and Instagram, down from almost $6.9 million in 2022-2023. And the government spent just $207,464 on X ads in 2023-2024, a decrease from $1.2 million the previous fiscal year.

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The decrease in spending on Facebook and Instagram coincided with a ban on government advertising that came into effect in July 2023. The government has since rescinded that ban so that it could buy ads on Meta platforms about the Liberal government’s GST tax holiday, according to CTV News.

The ban on advertising was a response to when Meta blocked Canadian news sites from its platforms in retaliation to the Online News Act, which forces tech companies to compensate Canadian journalism outlets for declining revenue.

The social media platform with the largest ad spend from the government in 2023-2024 was LinkedIn. The government spent almost $2.7 million on advertising on the business-oriented social media platform. This was 41 per cent of its ad spend on social media that fiscal year.

Savoie also confirmed that advertising on Meta platforms resumed on Jan. 23, 2025.

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